Catering To Vengeance Is Beneath Our Dignity Grudge Tool Capital Punishment Is Wrong Simply Because It Is Wrong.

Public opinion surveys leave no doubt: Most Americans want Timothy McVeigh killed.

McVeigh should suffer the same fate that his victims suffered when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. So the prevalent reasoning goes.

If the pollsters were to ask them, a majority of Americans might well support the idea of penning McVeigh inside a vacant building and blowing it up.

Regardless of public opinion, however, the country’s justice system doesn’t allow that. We have limits meant to prevent justice from corruption by mob rule.

The most cold-blooded offenders, for example, can’t legally be whipped or caned or tortured. Not because they might not deserve that kind of suffering - or public opinion wouldn’t applaud it - but because our society forbids cruel and unusual punishment, deserved or not.

Killing, however, is OK. A majority of the American public approves.

It’s a concession the federal government and most states make to the mob’s craving for vengeance, and it sets us apart from every other industrialized country in the world. In the United States alone, among presumably advanced nations, institutionalized killing has a formal role in the criminal justice system.

If it seems that sparing McVeigh’s life would be disrespectful to the 168 victims he killed or those he maimed or left bereaved, listen to the words of Bud Welch, whose daughter died in the blast.

“To me,” he writes in the current issue of Time Magazine, “the death penalty is vengeance, and vengeance doesn’t really help anyone in the healing process.”

The death penalty isn’t meant to assist in healing or even to bring closure to survivors’ grief. It certainly doesn’t restore lives. It is meant to carry out a societal grudge.

Timothy McVeigh should spend the rest of his life behind bars, with no chance for release. But neither he nor any other human being should be killed by the very government that outlaws killing.

The reason capital punishment is wrong is not because an innocent person may be executed by mistake, nor because it is applied disproportionately among the disadvantaged.

Capital punishment is wrong simply because it is wrong. And it should be ended not out of sympathy for McVeigh but out of respect for our national dignity.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view, see “Justice requires that he must die”

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